Fireproof

by Raj Kamal Jha

  ‘That’s what I have been asking you all this while: where are we going?’

  ‘I am Miss Glass’s humble servant, she leads, I follow. She orders, I obey. And, sir, I didn’t even know her until last night but now I can’t think of my life without her. Isn’t that something?’

  ‘Where did both of you meet?’

  ‘We met in the city, in the smoke and in the fire. I will say no more, I will only add that everyone is waiting for you, for you and Ithim.’

  ‘Who’s everyone?’

  ‘Sir, I told you my lips are sealed. I think I have already spoken more than I should, my job is straight and simple, I just fetch and carry. I was told to pick you up here, drop you off there.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘You will soon see. Not very far, it’s a beautiful place about six hours away by train. I have booked the best, Air-conditioned First Class, for ourselves, two berths, Upper and Lower, and a sliding door we can close so no one will disturb us. You must be tired. After the late lunch, you could do with some sleep. I will look after Ithim. Both of you are in very safe hands now.’

  Well aware that I wasn’t going to make any headway with my fruitless interrogation, I decided it was better that I let go, that I reconcile myself to the fact I would have to continue in the same uncertain vein – lots of hope and of blind faith – that had brought me thus far. And so resigned, I got up from the table and was about to start walking towards the cafeteria door, when Bright Shirt muttered under his breath,

  ‘Look at this child,

  So sweet and so strong

  What’s the problem? I

  can’t find any wrong.

  Look at this child,

  Like a star in the night,

  Tell me, sir, seriously,

  Want to set him right?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked. ‘What did you just say? That there’s no need to set him right?’

  ‘I am sorry, I didn’t mean it that way,’ said Bright Shirt.

  ‘What way, then? Even you, look at you, you have arms and legs, you can walk and talk. My Ithim has nothing, Miss Glass said she will set Ithim right and that’s the only reason I came all the way here, carrying him with me.’

  ‘No, Mr Jay, I was only expressing a thought, my humble, personal view. What happened between you and Miss Glass is none of my business, sir. Whatever Miss Glass told you that’s for you and Miss Glass to discuss, not for me. My job, as I said, is just to fetch and to carry. Fetch and carry, fetchandcarry.’

  And with a gleam in his eye, Bright Shirt pointed to the display board in the distance:

  ‘The train’s here,

  the train’s here,

  the time has come

  To go, my dear.’

  Freeze this moment.

  Call it absurd, farcical, even poignant, call it whatever you wish. If you were looking at the crowd from above, if your eyes had swept across the station, they would certainly have stopped at this dwarf, at this splash of colour, this dwarf carrying a baby in a bag, not even a day old. And the baby’s father following him, as if he were a child himself, afraid that he might lose his way in the crowd. Bright Shirt had told me nothing I didn’t know, he had made me appear distrustful, suspicious, he had acted as if it was a crime to ask him questions, he had taken me for granted, he had assumed I had no right to ask him anything, that I had no options, that I was at his mercy now and I couldn’t do a thing to change this. Well, the fact was that Bright Shirt was right.

  I had no options, I had to board the train now I had come this far. Because wasn’t this what Ithim and I had been waiting for all this while?

  We will all be quiet now, no more distractions, no more whispering in these footnotes, et Mr Jay’s story move towards its end, smooth and unhindered.

  20. Night of the Scorpion,

  Jump from the Train

  MY mother, my father and the night of the scorpion, all three slipped into the train from some place far, far away, many, many years ago. Unmindful of the train’s sway and jerk, they must have moved, on tiptoe, unseen and unheard, put one foot on the lower berth where Bright Shirt and Ithim were and then climbed onto the upper berth where I lay, resting my head on the bag, rolled up to serve as a pillow. It had been more than an hour since we had pulled out of the station. The train’s rhythmic clatter, the soft padding of the berth under my back, the dim light in the coach, my legs stretched straight, my stomach heavy after the meal I had so ravenously eaten, the load lifting from my head – that, finally, I was on board – and the hushed sounds from below, of Bright Shirt humming what seemed like a lullaby to Ithim: these together had the same effect as someone gently closing my eyes. And opening to let slip in a dream. Of my mother, my father, the night of the scorpion and, of course, the rain.

  I am about nine, ten years old, I have to stand on my toes to reach the light switch on the wall. It’s very early in the morning (or it could be very late at night), because it’s still dark. It’s raining very heavily.

  The night had been still and hot, there was a power cut as we went to sleep, Mother, Father and I, so we all slept on the bedroom floor rather than our beds, because the floor was cement and cooler to the touch. The rain must have begun later in the night, after we had fallen asleep.

  I woke up to its noise: its drumming on the asbestos sheets of the slum outside, its gurgling down the pipes that hugged the wall of our flat and ran all the way from the terrace to the yard where we played cricket.

  Rain is distilled water, my geography teacher said, it’s pure, condensed vapour, it’s only when it falls down, through the air, that it picks up dirt, the smoke of the city, and once it touches the ground, it picks up everything else. So if you can trap the raindrops the moment they begin their downward journey, not allow them to fall through the sky, if you can put a giant cup or plate right where the clouds are, you will get water purer than you get from any filter in the world.

  At this time of night, there is no smoke in the city and less dirt in the air, so I imagine the rain falling cleanly in the yard below. I close my eyes and wait for sleep to drag me back into its folds.

  It’s then that I hear voices.

  Mother and Father are awake. Father is saying something, his words unclear above the noise of the rain. I open my eyes and slowly, like fog in the winter sun, the night clears to show Father sitting on the floor. I hear Mother crying. Power hasn’t been restored and I can see the blades of the ceiling fan, flat and unmoving.

  ‘It will be morning in one hour or so,’ Father says, ‘I will get the doctor.’ At first, I think Mother is running a temperature and she is weak but then Mother doesn’t cry when she has a fever. Her eyes are closed, her face is drawn as if she is in pain, a lot of pain.

  ‘What happened?’ I ask.

  I was supposed to be asleep, my question is unexpected, it makes Father turn with a start. ‘What are you doing up so late? You go to sleep, it’s not morning yet.’

  ‘Why is Mother crying?’ I ask.

  Mother reaches out with her left hand and holds my hand, I am awake now, I am sitting on the floor, so that Mother is now the only one lying down, between Father and son.

  ‘You go back to sleep,’ she says, ‘Father is right, you have to go to school tomorrow.’

  I want to tell her, no, I want to know what has happened, because I have never seen Mother cry like this. (Only once have I seen her cry but then she was in the kitchen and when I asked, she said it was the smoke.)

  ‘Something bit her, some insect,’ says Father, ‘if you don’t want to sleep now, then sit beside her, hold your mother’s hand, near the wrist, and keep pressing hard. Something bit her finger, the poison mustn’t spread. I will go light the lantern.’

  He gets up and walks out of the room. When he opens the door, the sound of the rain comes gushing in, louder, bringing with it a spray of water drops that shower my face with a million tiny points of cold and wet. ‘Close the door,’ Mother tells Father, ‘he will fall ill if h
e catches the rain.’

  And I sit there, holding Mother’s hand, her fingers

  covered with their own shadows. In the dark, I can’t see any swelling, any bruise, but I keep pressing her wrist with everything I have.

  ‘Not so hard,’ she says, and I relax my grip, ease the pressure, but I am still holding, afraid, the task is too much for me, the responsibility immense. Even the slightest wavering and Mother might die. For if I am not careful, the poison will spread from her wrist, run into her veins and her arteries, travel along her arms, her shoulders, her neck, then down again, to her heart and her stomach to her legs to her face to her head her fingers and her toes – the pus, the black blue yellow green.

  So I keep pressing her wrist without the courage to look at her, outside it’s still raining, harder now, the asbestos sheets clap loudly in the wind and the rain, a section must have come off, slapping the wall that separates our cricket pitch from the slum.

  Father is back, with a lantern and some warm water in a bowl. He sits down and in the yellow light I see Mother’s face drawn in pain, her eyes closed. ‘Keep pressing on the wrist,’ Father says, as he dips the end of a towel in the warm water, wrings it nearly dry, and then places it on top of her hand. Now I can see what’s causing her so much pain, her thumb is swollen, it’s blue and yellow, as if something has entered her, some creature with a yellow tongue and blue eyes and black teeth and is sitting there, refusing to come out, and is breathing poison inside her, waiting for its breath to travel all through her before it decides what to do next.

  How long we sit there I am not sure, me holding Mother’s hand and Father daubing her fingers and her forehead with the warm towel, but the night begins to fade.

  When the water in the bowl has gone cold, Father gets up, leaves, comes back dressed in a shirt and trousers. He takes an umbrella, and, telling me to sit beside Mother, to keep watch, keep pressing, he says he is going to get the doctor.

  Mother has fallen asleep by then and I sit there, the thin morning light seeping in through the crack in the door, like the rain itself. I listen to the rain, I look at the light, my fingers on her wrist, in a vicelike grip, I am determined not to let one drop of the poison slip into her body. When my fingers hurt I switch hands, but I do this so fast and in such a manner that her wrist never once goes unattended. I am her son. To save her life is my duty.

  My eyes feel as if stones have been tied to each eyelash but I have to keep them open until Father returns. Now that Mother is sleeping, I have to be more careful. I am afraid that if I let my eyes close, even just to blink, the poison will rush in. And so I sit and wait, my legs hurting now, the floor cold, the rain howling outside, the only comfort the rasping sound of Mother breathing, as if it’s taking a considerable effort: Mother is alive.

  Doctor comes carrying a leather bag, his hair wet from the rain. Father closes the umbrella and props it against the wall; in the lantern light it looks like a huge, wet crow, resting in a puddle. Doctor sits beside Mother, asks me to let go. ‘Good job, you have done well,’ he says, and I watch him prepare an injection, I turn my eyes away. Father tells me to leave the room. From the veranda, I can hear Mother scream.

  I stand near the door, my ears pressed to the wall, my heart racing, one half of my body drenched in the rain that shows no signs of letting up. ‘There, it’s done,’ Doctor tells Father, ‘the danger is gone, I have written out a prescription for some ointment you must get when the shops open. And I brought some tablets she should take right away.’

  ‘What was it?’ I ask, coming in.

  ‘I told your father,’ says Doctor, ‘it looks like it was a scorpion. It could have been dangerous but good that your father fetched me; even one more hour and I don’t know what would have happened. The scorpion must have died by now, though. Look for it when it’s light.’

  I stay at home that day, skip school. Father does too.

  The power comes back with the rain-soaked sun and once the ceiling fan is switched on, blowing the dank air out of the room, and Mother is fast asleep sedated after the injection, her hand draped in a white bandage, double its size, I fall asleep too. I get up several times during the day as the rain continues, to keep vigil beside Mother, and then once to the balcony to watch the yard below, now under almost a foot of water. (There won’t be any cricket today.)

  Later in the afternoon, when the maid comes to do the dishes, she finds the scorpion in the drain, just outside the bedroom. After stinging Mother, it must have crawled back there and died. (She calls me to come and look and what strikes me is how small it is. I had seen pictures in books and had always imagined the scorpion to be a monster, with huge poison sacs touching the floor. But here it is, a tiny insect, no longer than my little finger.)

  The maid brings a hammer from the kitchen and hits the scorpion. A greenish liquid squirts out. ‘That’s the poison,’ she says, ‘you need to do this so that other scorpions can see and don’t come to this house.’

  I believe it.

  It seems the most logical thing in the world. That hitting this creature and hitting it ruthlessly, with no mercy, with a hammer, even when it’s dead, is what you need to do, to teach the others a lesson.

  So I take the hammer from the maid and I pound the scorpion, I keep hammering away until a bit of the cement chips off the floor, I keep hammering away until the greenish slime dries into a crust, until the scorpion’s body turns into paste, until the maid comes running and says, stop it, you will wake up Mother, I keep killing the scorpion until my hands hurt, until I am sure that all the scorpions in the city have seen what I have just done. There is sweat running down my back.

  In the evening, Mother wakes up; the maid has cooked dinner, soup and some rice and some fish. Mother sits on the bed and I watch her eat. She reaches out with her bandaged hand and places it on my head. ‘I am so lucky,’ she says, ‘that the scorpion did not get you.’

  A few years later, in school, I got a new poetry textbook that had a poem, right at the beginning, called ‘The Night of the Scorpion’, by Nissim Ezekiel. And to this day, I can recall the lines by heart. I remember the night my mother was stung by a scorpion. Ten hours of steady rain had driven him to crawl beneath a sack of rice. Parting with his poison – flash of diabolic tail in the dark room – he risked the rain again. And the poem then described how local farmers came searching for the creature and buzzed the Name of God a hundred times to paralyse the Evil One. How their candles and their lanterns threw giant scorpion shadows on the sun-baked walls. The father in the poem, sceptic, rationalist, tried every curse and blessing, even poured paraffin on the mother’s toes and set it on fire. I watched the flame feeding on my mother, the poem ended, I watched the holy man perform his rites to tame the poison with incantation. After twenty hours it lost its sting. My mother only said: Thank God the scorpion picked on me and spared my children.

  I remember that afternoon rushing home with the poem, reading it to my mother, who listened, then asked me to read it again. This was the first time in my life I had read a poem that was about something I didn’t need to imagine, something that had happened and had happened to me. I asked Mother how the poet’s mother said the same exact thing as she, my mother, had said that night. She smiled in reply: ‘Mothers are the same everywhere; they always think about their children first.’

  ‘ARE you OK, Mr Jay? You were talking in your sleep, you were almost shouting.’ It was Bright Shirt, standing on the lower berth, his face staring up at me, I could smell his sweat, I could see the colours on his clothes, muted in the dim light from the electric bulb in the coach.

  ‘How much longer?’

  ‘Just a couple of hours,’ he said, swinging up, to sit on the berth, at my feet. ‘And don’t worry about Ithim, he’s fast asleep. I have already cleaned him and given him another feed so now there’s nothing to worry until tomorrow morning. I covered him with a blanket, I wanted them to reduce the air-conditioning but they said it can’t be done.’

  �
��Where are we?’ I asked, propping myself on my elbows, straining to look through the window below my berth. All I could see was a black rectangle, streaks of light, maybe some village, some station where the train wasn’t supposed to stop. I also saw lines of water on the window, from outside. Maybe it was the water condensing, or maybe rain.

  ‘I told you, sir, about two hours to go. I will wake you up when it’s time, you can go back to sleep now.’ And then he added, almost as an afterthought: ‘Just one thing I wanted to tell you. We aren’t getting off at a station, we are going to get off in between two stations.’

  ‘What do you mean, between two stations?’

  ‘To save time. I will pull the chain, then jump out of the window.’

  ‘But the windows are sealed.’

  ‘No, I have found a way out, in the next coach, there’s a window that can be opened and no one will see me there while everyone is fast asleep. I’m going to pull the chain and jump with Ithim in the bag. Not to worry, I can do that, given my size. But you should be at the entrance. The moment I pull the chain, the train will begin to slow down; don’t wait for it to come to a dead stop, but when it slows down enough, to a pace you think you can handle, jump. I will be waiting and then you can follow me. We will have to walk fast, we may even have to run the first few minutes.’

  ‘But why? Why can’t we get off at a station and then take a bus or something, go from there? This is too risky.’

  ‘It’s not, this is the tenth time today I will be doing this. This way, we save more than three hours, since the closest stop is at least a hundred miles away from where we have to go. Also, it will be dark, no one will see us, no one from inside the coaches will even know the train has stopped. And by the time the guard wakes up, finds out it was our coach where the chain was pulled, it will be too late, we will be far away. At the most, he will curse us, call us all sorts of names. But it’s late in the night, he will wave the green flag for the driver, return to his coach and fall asleep.’